I was departing CYXY, around 1000ft MSL and I experienced an engine failure. I tried pressing 0 to get the mayday menu but since I was departing there was nothing but a “return”. So I went to the PDF manual and read this about Maydays:

You can declare an emergency any time that you are airborne. An emergency call has the following format:
mayday mayday mayday <call sign> <emergency type> <request>
This version of VoxATC has five types of emergency currently defined, these are:
engine failure
fuel low
hydraulic failure avionics failure passenger critically ill
You can make any standard request, but will most frequently want vectors to the nearest suitable airport.
Example:
mayday mayday mayday cessna one one five one delta avionics failure request vectors to nearest airport

I did the exact same request and the ATC acknowledged I was a mayday but asked for my request again. I tried asking for “vectors to nearest airport” in multiple ways but was unable to get anything to be understood.

What would be the correct VOXATC phraseology and what is “any standard request”?

Thanks a lot 🙂

Try it again and squawk 7700.

On 9/23/2019 at 9:51 PM, jabloomf1230 said:

Try it again and squawk 7700.

Will try, but do you think the squawk really will change anything?

All I can say is that the Mayday feature of VOXATC works for me, but that doesn't mean anything, as each setup is different. The way that the emergency declaration works is that VOXATC takes your flightplan when you are at your departure airport and collects all the potential airports that can be used for an emergency landing along the route. So when you declare an emergency, it already knows what airport to send you to.

Unfortunately, any airport along the route could have something malformed that would cause the process to fail. As a result, troubleshooting is difficult even with advanced error logging enabled. Try the logging route and see what you can figure out.

On 9/30/2019 at 3:56 AM, jabloomf1230 said:

All I can say is that the Mayday feature of VOXATC works for me, but that doesn't mean anything, as each setup is different. The way that the emergency declaration works is that VOXATC takes your flightplan when you are at your departure airport and collects all the potential airports that can be used for an emergency landing along the route. So when you declare an emergency, it already knows what airport to send you to.

Unfortunately, any airport along the route could have something malformed that would cause the process to fail. As a result, troubleshooting is difficult even with advanced error logging enabled. Try the logging route and see what you can figure out.

What is different here I think is that I was departing the area. I wasn’t at the « fly flight plan » stage yet. 

I think that you have the correct explanation. VOXATC must not be coded to allow you to declare an emergency before you are enroute.  I'll see what I can figure out on my end.

Declaring an emergency doesn't seem to work unless you are a certain distance from the departure airport. I couldn't determine whether the lack of response was related to either which com frequency I was on or just distance. I assumed that once you see "Fly the flightplan" then you must be "enroute", but that must not be the trigger that's used. One thing that I would suggest (although I've had trouble with this mode) is in advanced settings, is to turn on expert mode. This eliminates any text prompts, but there's more flexibility in what the user can say. For example, you can also say "pan pan" three times, which in real life is used urgent situations that are lower in priority than an emergency. The format would be:

Quote

"pan pan pan pan pan pan"
"usercallsign"
"useraircrafttype"
"passenger ill"
"will attempt forced landing"
 "request vectors to the nearest airport"

There are also "urgent requests" but I don't think VOXATC recognizes that terminology.

Good luck.

1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Declaring an emergency doesn't seem to work unless you are a certain distance from the departure airport. I couldn't determine whether the lack of response was related to either which com frequency I was on or just distance. I assumed that once you see "Fly the flightplan" then you must be "enroute", but that must not be the trigger that's used. One thing that I would suggest (although I've had trouble with this mode) is in advanced settings, is to turn on expert mode. This eliminates any text prompts, but there's more flexibility in what the user can say. For example, you can also say "pan pan" three times, which in real life is used urgent situations that are lower in priority than an emergency. The format would be:

There are also "urgent requests" but I don't think VOXATC recognizes that terminology.

Good luck.

Thank you very much. Haven’t been brave enough to try the expert mode yet, but will certainly do when I’m efficient enough. 

Best of luck with expert mode. I don't think my mic is good enough to support it, so I stopped trying to use that mode. It's a great concept, but the implementation seems too restricted by the Win 10 speech recognition, which doesn't work perfectly with USB microphones.

3 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Best of luck with expert mode. I don't think my mic is good enough to support it, so I stopped trying to use that mode. It's a great concept, but the implementation seems too restricted by the Win 10 speech recognition, which doesn't work perfectly with USB microphones.

Did you do all the Microsoft training? Not only the Voxatc one. I did it extensively and even though English isn’t my native language and I have a terrible accent, speech recognition works perfectly. 

I’m mostly not ready because of all the frequencies I don’t know to choose correctly (FFS and centers...) and I’m still struggling to use the correct phraseology without text to read. 

1 hour ago, Karelpatch said:

Did you do all the Microsoft training? Not only the Voxatc one.

The VOXATC training utility uses the MS training app, only with phrases extracted from your flightplan via the VFR and IFR XML file templates located in the VOXATC program folder.. I've used both training apps, plus I created a big speech recognition dictionary using the Win 10 speech control panel app. VOXATC works fine with the VOXATC normal mode. But in Expert Mode, it gets lost a number of times per flight, so I just forgot about it. I've tried both my headset mic and a Shure desktop mic. They both work about the same for both P2ATC (for XP11) and VOXATC.  The problem is according to Microsoft is that USB mics are just not good enough for 99.9+% accuracy SR.